Balboa Park as never seen before

A new way to see the park takes one back in time while testing one’s detective skills in a cell-phone adventure game that’s part scavenger hunt, part information, part half-hour easy walk and wholly entertaining.

Enter Balboa Park just days after Pearl Harbor by starting at today’s Old Globe Theatre box office. Use a cell phone to hear narrations, solve the clues and quickly find four mystery sites.

The venture was launched by Balboa Park Online Collaborative with information available at

giskin.org. “It’s just one aspect of what we want to do—get more people interested in the park and the museums and to realize what is here,” said Maren Dougherty of the collaborative. Other projects include digitizing of museum collections to make them available online.

It’s fun with a serious purpose. Maybe visitors will decide to explore the Timken or the Natural History Museum. Or buy a book to learn more.

At the very least, successful sleuthers will think about how World War II changed San Diego and the park. Or about the romantic couple in the narration, separated by a call to war and never to keep their parkside rendezvous at what was once “Honeymoon Bridge.”

Episode two launches today at the San Diego Museum of Art. Stay tuned.